Felix Ketay, a 25-year-old Los Angeles dyke, has her foundations shaken when she's ditched by her pomosexual girlfriend and then gay-bashed on the streets of West Hollywood.

Felix's old-school lesbian aunt, Anna Lisa Hill, ran away from home in 1965 at age 19 and ended up in Lilac Mines, a small town in California's Sierra Nevada foothills with a small but tight-knit butch/femme community.

When Felix joins her aunt in Lilac Mines hoping to discover a place of respite, Anna Lisa proves stand-offish, so Felix devotes herself to investigating the town's 100-year-old mystery: the disappearance of 16-year-old Lilac Ambrose in the mine shafts that run beneath the mountain.

Felix learns that finding an authentic history is never easy, but Lilac Mines--with its abandoned mines, unknowable secrets, and the occasional quirky-cute thrift store employee--might not be such a bad place to try.

About the author: Cheryl Klein is a shameless Angeleno, quiet pescatarian, and shameful tabloid reader. She lives in Los Angeles where she is West Coast director of Poets & Writers, Inc.